cosmonicthe company behind the open source wasmCloud project, announced today that its WebAssembly (Wasm) Platform as a Service the offering is now in public beta. In this open beta, Cosmonic is also introducing a number of new features that are intended to make it easier to integrate Wasm into existing applications, including Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes, which makes it much easier to integrate existing Kubernetes clusters and WebAssembly applications that are run in Cosmonic.
The company was co-founded by Liam Randall, who previously founded Critical Stack, an early Kubernetes company, which was acquired by Capital One. He also worked on projects such as Cloud Custodian, which Capital One later donated to the CNCF, and later joined Stackletwhose objective was to commercialize Cloud Custodian.
“I’m more excited about WebAssembly and Cosmonic than ever about anything. I really think today we’re going to talk about the next age of computing,” he told me.
However, just like in the early days of Kubernetes, the Wasm community is still building the necessary ecosystem around the core technology to make it acceptable to large enterprises. It is possible to use Wasm in production, as large companies like Adobe and Cloudflare have demonstrated, but the tools are still very rudimentary. And for many teams, the focus of WebAssembly is Functions as a Service (FaaS). It’s definitely an important use case, but the Cosmonic team wants to go further.
“A lot of people are really leaning towards FaaS. It’s all functions,” explained Cosmonic’s director of engineering, Taylor Thomas. “And you know what, that’s a really good use case. Personally, I think that within the next three to five years, all FaaS platforms will use WebAssembly, because it’s the easiest way to get support for all languages. But that’s a small slice of a much bigger picture. And that’s where Cosmonic and wasmCloud really shine. We don’t lock you into a specific platform architecture. We don’t want you to have to say: you have to do this as a FaaS. You can use it as a FaaS, that’s entirely possible, but you can also build monoliths, you can build microservices, you can build event-driven architectures.”
The promise of WebAssembly, after all, is not that it will allow users to build a better FaaS platform, but rather that developers will be able to write their code once and then run it anywhere, and that’s what Cosmonic wants to focus on, plus from an emphasis on the WebAssembly component model, which allows developers to assemble different components of their applications and run that code anywhere, something Cosmonic also emphasizes in its PaaS product.
Image Credits: cosmonic
“WebAssembly, and specifically the WebAssembly component model, is intended to be the final abstraction of the technology,” Randall said. “It turns application libraries into building blocks and these building blocks are aligned with contracts for things like an abstraction for a global database or a key value store or a message queue. And then under the hood, at runtime, you can attach them to completely different implementations, even in different languages, as long as the interface is the same. This is the ultimate abstraction that all of technology has really been looking for for the last 20 years.”
Cosmonic’s PaaS is enabled by the wasmCloud application runtime, which Cosmonic donated to the CNCF in 2021. Some of the more than 150 contributors to this project include Capital One, Volvo, BMW, and Intel.
Another open source project from Cosmonic is Wadm, a declarative application manager for wasmCloud applications. This takes a model most developers are familiar with from the cloud-native infrastructure world and extends it into the WebAssembly space.
“We think of this as upgrading your car with the latest technology,” Thomas said. “Your car may be years old, but it still runs great and you really enjoy driving it. But you also really like the idea of a push-button start and a hybrid motor. Wadm allows you to keep what you love about your infrastructure: familiar, easy to maintain, reliable, running forever, up-to-date with the latest features.”